Instead of linking to the old post, I thought I'd make a fresh post with all the Jack Collier stuff.

If you don’t know about the Jack Collier stories, they’re a series of detective stories that I wrote and posted on this journal.The main character is a Troy, Michigan based detective who lives in a world where holidays, organizations and concepts are all people. I really tried to keep too many fantasy elements out of these tales, trying to make sure that if I changed the names you’d just think they were some hard boiled detective fiction. They were posted in serial fashion, a few pages each day. I enjoyed writing them, and some people enjoyed reading them, even though reading lots of text on a computer screen is a pain in the patoot. I had intended to get the first four stories together into a book and get an on-demand publisher to print them, or something. That hasn’t happened yet because life happened and the editing of the manuscripts got pushed aside for a while. I’ll get back to that soon and you can all buy a paper version of the stories.

Anyway, here are the links to the stories themselves…

Christmas NoirThis story was an experiment. I’d never done first person with any kind of success, I’d never done anything outside the realms of sci-fi/ fantasy/ comic book style of story and I’d never really written much in the way of a holiday story. So I decided to make a hard boiled 30s style detective story which also reflected my feelings on Christmas and all that. This would set up Jack Collier and his world, and would lead to later stories. Things a re still a little rough in this story, but you can see where things are going. I liked this story enough to want to see the character again, so it was a successful experiment.

WonderlandThis second story was supposed to be some sort of Easter story, but I dropped that idea pretty quickly and made it something else. This story is where Jack’s knack of being a total screw up was cemented forever. That might be a spoiler, but you don’t know how he screwed up yet so it should be okay. This story also solidified the use of literary and movie references. Specifically it set classic children's literature as the number one place for references to be drawn from.

Liberty's ChildThis is probably my favorite story. This is the most reference heavy of all the stories, because I decided to make it a contest. This story turned out to be the most action oriented of all the stories. Jack doesn’t so much solve the mystery as much as follow a marked out trail. Still, that’s okay because he more or less falls into things in all the stories anyway. This is also the place where I really started to explore my feelings that Jack shouldn’t be the kind of person you want to hang out with. I made parts of the story deliberately cringe worthy, just to make sure everyone would know that Jack isn’t some kind of white knight.

In the CabinetThis was meant to be a little more E.A. Poe and EC Comics then the other stories had been. If I were going to do a page one re-write of one of the stories, this would be it. It’s not that it’s bad, but it really wants to have more room to stretch out. This one is also the least reference heavy of all the stories, so it feels lesser.

Jack & JillThis was an experiment with trying to tell the same story through two points of view. Here we start with Jill starting the story, then Jack starts telling the story. Jill's segments don't come as often as I'd first thought, but I'm pleased with how it turned out.

Jack Collier: Private EyeJack wakes up, Jack gets up, Jack gets a new job and has to work everything out before the end. The longest and most complicated of the stories, maybe too much so. Who can tell.

BONUS!For Your Toys OnlyThis last one was meant as a bit of fun and shouldn't really be taken seriously. It’s a joke on action movie, James Bond and Jack Higgins for the most part. I don’t think it really did all that I wanted it to do though. Partly because I’d done an action story already and partly because my heart wasn’t really in it at the time. Still, it’s a bit of fun and you can amuse yourself by checking where everything came from.